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Quote mining is like looking for rare gold & silver (something of value). One must dig through tons of worthless slag, but if persistent, a nugget of truth may eventually surface.

Your Friend,

John

John!

Where you been? I've missed our excellent discussions. Glad you found time for a visit.

The term "quote mining" is usually used to speak of the fallacious use of quotes taken out of context. I agree that finding quotes can be like looking for rare gold and silver. For example, I love the quote from Voltaire "If you wish to converse with me, define your terms." I think that's great.

But when quotes are taken out of context to make it look like an author was saying the opposite of what he believes and said elsewhere, then it is a "high crime" of internet debate. Do you agree?

Cheers!

Richard

Skepticism is the antiseptic of the mind.

Remember why we debate. We have nothing to lose but the errors we hold. Who but a stubborn fool would hold to errors once they have been exposed?

The Bible doesn't say,"The Earth is flat". Not even vaguely.

In Isaiah 40:22, it gives a general outline of Earth as seen from outerspace... a CIRCLE.

In Psalm 103:12, it says,"As far as the east is from the west, so, far has He removed our transgressions from us".

Since God's forgiveness places our sins at the bottom of the sea, so that God will remember them no more. Ps.103:12 is giving an analogy of the distance between east from the west as being infinite. But, the distance of the east from the west cannot be infinite if it's flat... only if it's a sphere.

Job 26:10 says, if we look over the ocean's horizon, we'll see a circular horizon, or a curve on its horizon, which I've seen. A flat Earth would not show a circular horizon... but, a sphere would.

When the Bible talks of the 4 corners of the Earth... that's the 4 directions of South, North, East, West.. Also, when the book of Matthew says, that Jesus saw all the kingdoms of the Earth from a high mountain, which Satan took Him there to be tempted... that was a VISION, not physical reality.

The Bible does NOT say, the Earth is flat. But then again, haters of the Bible will continue to hate and lie about what the Bible actually says.

Then tell that to all the Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins, etc., that 'quote mine' in their books.

I don't think you understand the meaning of "quote mining" or the reason "quote mining is for morons."

Accurately quoting folks in a way that accurately represents what they really meant is never quote mining. Quote mining is the attempt to mislead your audience by quoting out of context so as to give a false impression of what your opponents actually believe. Creationists are famous for quote mining in their effort to create the false and misleading impressions about what leading evolutionary scientists really believe.

There is no need for an atheist to "quote mine" because the best case against creationistism is to accurately quote what they wrote in context so that everyone can see what they really meant so their arguments fall under the weight of their own absurdity.

Here it is in a simplified nutshell:

Creationists tend to "quote mine" because the truth does not support their arguments so they must misrepresent their opponents.

Atheists do not need to "quote mine" because the truth supports their arguments and the absurdity of the creationists claims is most obvious when they are accurately quoted.

Skepticism is the antiseptic of the mind.

Remember why we debate. We have nothing to lose but the errors we hold. Who but a stubborn fool would hold to errors once they have been exposed?

Nice Collection.

Originally Posted by CWH

Some quotes by great minds against evolution including Charles Darwin himself:

Even old Charlie wasn't real sure.

"You will be greatly disappointed (by the forthcoming book); it will be grievously too hypothetical. It will very likely be of no other service than collocating some facts; though I myself think I see my way approximately on the origin of the species. But, alas, how frequent, how almost universal it is in an author to persuade himself of the truth of his own dogmas."

Charles Darwin, 1858, in a letter to a colleague regarding the concluding chapters of his Origin of Species.

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What's that mean,

His theory had, in essence, preceded his knowledge-that is, he had hit upon a novel and evocative theory of evolution with limited knowledge at hand to satisfy either himself or others that the theory was true. He could neither accept it himself nor prove it to others. He simply did not know enough concerning the several natural history fields upon which his theory would have to be based.'

"It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favored by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test."

Personal letter from Dr Collin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, to Luther D. Sunderland

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"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten (Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia)

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It's all just a load of rubbish then.

"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ... it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing -- it ought not to be taught in high school'."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City

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"Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

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"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever! In explaining evolution we do not have one iota of fact."

(Dr. Newton Tahmisian, Atomic Energy Commission.)

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The brainwashed do not know they are brainwashed!

"I, myself, am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the credulity that it has."

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"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans - of upright, naked, tool-making, big-brained beings - is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter."

Dr. Lyall Watson, Anthropologist

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''We're not just evolving slowly,'' Gould says, ''for all practical purposes we're not evolving. There's no reason to think we're going to get bigger brains or smaller toes or whatever - we are what we are.''

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"...not being a paleontologist, I don't want to pour too much scorn on paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire to exaggerate the importance of those fragments..."

Dr. Greg Kirby (Senior Lecturer in Population Biology at Flinders University ) in an address given at a meeting of the Biology Teachers Association of South Australia.

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"the incident on a par with two other embarrassing faux pas by fossil hunters: Hesperopithecus, the fossil pig's tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown Man', the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the 'earliest Englishman'."

"The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid, that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."

(Dr. Tim White, anthropologist, University of California,

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They make it up as they go.

I mean the stories, the narratives about change over time. How the dinosaurs became extinct, how the mammals evolved, where man came from. These seem to me to be little more than story-telling.

We have access to the tips of a tree, the tree itself is a theory and people who pretended to know about the tree and to describe what went on with it, how the branches came off and the twigs came off are, I think, telling stories.

Dr. Colin Patterson,( Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London ) in an interview on British broadcasting Corporation ( BBC ) television

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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.

Stephen Jay Gould, Former Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University

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To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species

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"Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views. In all this great museum, there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species."

Dr. Etheridge, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, cited in Dr. Scott Huse, The Collapse of Evolution.

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"The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer."

- Dr. Richard Dawkins (Department of Zoology, Oxford University, UK)

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It is an impossible belief.

"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein".'

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"The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: a single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur .... There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it."

"When the blood of a seal, freshly killed at McMurdo Sound in the Antarctic was tested by carbon-14, it showed the seal had died 1,300 years ago."

From W. Dort Jr., Ph.D. -- Geology, Professor, University of Kansas

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A lake Bonney seal known to have died only a few weeks before was carbon dated. The results stated that the seal had died between 515 and 715 years ago.

(Antarctic Journal, Washington)

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"The hair on the Chekurovka mammoth was found to have a carbon-14 age of 26,000 years but the peaty soil in which is was preserved was found to have a carbon-14 dating of only 5,600 years."

("Dry bones and other fossils" by Dr. Gary Parker)

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"Scientists got dates of 164 million and 3 billion years for two Hawaiian lava flows. But these lava flows happened only about 200 years ago in 1800 and 1801.

(Radiocarbon Journal, Vol. 8, 1966.)

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"The Carbon-14 contents of the shells of the snails of Melanoides tuberculatus living today in artesian springs in southern Nevada indicate an apparent age of 27,000 years."

Alan C. Riggs, Science, vol 224 (1984) 58-61

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"In the light what is known about the radiocarbon method and the way it is used, it is truly astonishing that many authors will cite agreeable determinations as a "proof" for their beliefs. The implications of pervasive contamination and ancient variations in carbon-14 levels are steadfastly ignored by those who based their argument upon the dates. The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates.

’This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th-century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read’."

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' I know the question in the minds of many of you who have followed me to this point: "Does not science prove that there is no Creator?" Emphatically, science does not prove that!'

Paul A Moody, Ph.D. (zoology) (Emeritus Professor of Natural History and Zoology, University of Vermont)

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So why do most people believe it?

"Evolution is unproved and improvable, we believe it because the only alternative is special creation, which is unthinkable."